In this episode we bring the MSCLVR to the great outdoors again! My good friend and fellow music lover, Ben Lister invites us to his beautiful backyard on a sunny, breezy afternoon in LA where we learn about Ben’s passion for odd instruments (which we feature live here) as well as his journey from a young music label guy at the beginning of the digital music revolution, his involvement in the launch of iTunes while at Warner Music, and of course the path that brought him from London to the US where he now resides with his lovely family.

Boy does Ben love music! Ben studied music at the University of Westminster in London and was savvy enough to turn an internship into full time gig as the Head of Digital Media at Warner Music Group in London back in the early 2000s. Luck would have it that, at this early stage of the mp3, Ben would be directly involved in the initial partnerships with Apple and subsequently the launch of iTunes!

So where does one go from leading digital media at a major label as a first job? Clearly you go on to be a bawse at Viacom/MTV running a P&L against digital media and acquisitions – and by a twist of fate Ben would do a stint at local TV network which would lead him into the world of YouTube! Ben would join Base79, which would be acquired by a competitor called Rightster in 2014, which then would change their name to Brave Bison (why? God only knows).

Through the shuffle Ben managed to move his family from London to beautiful Santa Monica, CA where, after a few C level titles elsewhere, he has now turned the corner back into the world of music – this time as Chief Revenue Officer of a startup called Haawk (https://haawk.com/) which monitors, monetizes, and enforces music copyrights on every major UGC platform through technology magic.